Microsoft is facing an uphill battle to push copies of Office 2003 on customers and its ISV partner ecosystem, ahead of next year’s predicted launch of Office 12.
Microsoft is facing an uphill battle to push copies of Office 2003 on customers and its ISV partner ecosystem, ahead of next year’s predicted launch of Office 12.
Two years too late…
From the article: “Microsoft believes customers should adopt Office 2003 now, rather than hold out for the anticipated release of Office 12….[O]ne hurdle Microsoft must clear is persuading customers to overcome the basic level of comfort and familiarity they have using their existing, older, copies of Office. Capossela believes Microsoft can overcome this inertia by evangelizing people on how the workplace has changed and later versions of Office can meet their needs.”
What ever happened to “The customer is always right”? This whole approach is predicated on the assumption that a workplace manager wants Microsoft to come in and tell him/her how they should be handling word processing and email. I know what I would say if Mr. Capossela came to my office to tell me how my workplace has changed.
The funny thing about Office upgrades is that next to noone needs them (sure, some people use that occasional new feature). The main thing they seem to change is the UI…just to make sure it looks nothing like any other software in windows. I could use office 97 and do everything I want!
I don’t care, I use oo.org anyway
Wow, what I said was really b****y. woops
Well writen!
I know only one kind of people constantly upgrading to every new version of MS Office: people using pirated copies of it.
If people has to pay 240 $ (standard price for an upgrade to Office 2003 Standard Ed) just for an image change, they would spend their money better purchasing new clothes and going to the hairdresser.
People needs something better for such an amount of money.
It is really tough to say what Microsoft Office 2003 was even about. When using it vs. Office XP, it seems about the same, except with a slapped on UI refresh.
Sort of like Windows 2003, the value proposition was small, if not non-existent, when you factor in upgrade costs and incompatibilities and the wide gamut of bugs and problems that goes along with any Microsoft “upgrade”.
Corporations are being smart in staying with what works. They’ve learned. Maybe 1-2 years after Office 12, they will look at it.
The lawsuits should be mostly settled by that time and corporations will be able to see what their choices really are. Some chunk of them will probably go with the ISO standard Open Office toolset vs. Microsoft’s fake open format.
That’s what Microsoft fails to understand. If people are relying on office suites that have worked well for years, what incentive do they have to put up with the massive upheaval in upgrading? Nothing. No company rips out its telephone or electrical systems every two or three years to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Unfortunately for them, that’s what software has become – static infrastructure that people want to rely on.
“Eighteen months is along time for people to wait.”
No it isn’t. No company in their right mind is going to ditch the software they’re familiar with for the massive upheaval and cost of upgrading to Office 2003 that Microsoft will deprectate and not even talk about in eighteen months. If they’ve been using their current office suites for five years plus then eighteen months is nothing.
Also questionable is just how far the improvements in search and integration between recent versions of Office and server products like SharePoint Portal Server
I know of absolutely no one who uses Sharepoint, or even knows what it is. All people want to do is write documents, use spreadsheets and come up with presentations. That’s it. It’s a done market.
When you’re talking about enforcing collaboration software and rights management on people you’re asking them to keep track of what their work relationships are, who they want to give access to their documents and then they have to tell the software about all of this so it can enforce it because if they don’t then it’s useless. Who the hell has got time to do that? And, as we all know in every organisation, it will all change tomorrow, and the right people won’t get the right documents or won’t have access to them. Software like Sharepoint solves absolutely none of this and simply makes it worse. Read my lips – the limit has been reached, and this is never going to work.
Office is one of those rare programs that seems to get worse with every release. They add a new (largely useless) feature or two, a new UI skin, an incompatible file format, and get slower, more unstable, and more expensive.
Word is already the sorriest excuse for a word processor I’ve ever seen, essentially unusable without weeks of training to get around the “features” and find what you need hidden among all the “features.” Every (and I mean every, including several we paid a lot for) third party Office addon I’ve ever tried has been horrendously buggy and hard to use: I currently have the only computer in the office that will make a PDF without crashing. Maybe that’s one of the third party opportunities they keep mentioning?
I have Word 98 on my Mac’s (computer show copy I use to open files); whatever the office gave on the PC (XP I think, we have 2003 but I’ve never bothered to install it.) About the only thing they could do to make me upgrade would be to remove about 50% of the “features” and make what’s left less awkward and painful and confusing to use.
“I currently have the only computer in the office that will make a PDF without crashing.”
That has been one nice feature native to OpenOffice/StarOffice – PDF generation. It’s one of the reasons I switched to StarOffice awhile back. OpenOffice even has a way to generate Flash files from an Impress presentation.
Why hasn’t Microsoft added any of these useful features to Office, yet? Or have they?
Why hasn’t Microsoft added any of these useful features to Office, yet? Or have they?
There’s about three reasons. Mostly it’s about pride. They don’t want you using any software on a widespread basis unless it’s theirs.
The first (less critical) reason is that Microsoft has never wanted want to tread on the toes of other companies who make software for the Windows platform. That is especially the case if those companies make software that doesn’t compete directly with them or makes software that integrates with Windows and Office.
The second (more critical) reason is that Microsoft will never, under any circumstances, allow themselves, their products and customers to rely on formats and protocols that they do not control. If they start to encourage their customers to rely on PDF and SWF then they are giving up too much control. Also, if Microsoft encourages people to use a particular format then it’s like a seal of approval. Microsoft doesn’t want to give it.
The third reason is a question of the future. Everybody knows that if you are a successful company making great margins off software, especially on Windows, then Microsoft wants most or all of it. You can’t do your own thing on Windows. Look at the envious eyes Microsoft has cast over Macromedia, Sage and Adobe. Because of that, Microsoft never wants its products and customers using formats that they will want to compete (sorry, extinguish) with in the future.
There’s about three reasons.[…]
I agree on everything you said. I’d just add that that we have to admit that in years MS built a very good and strong Office suite and, in a way, they’re a bit victims of their success.
I’m struck with Office XP as well. It covers more than my needs and it’s a very good platform. So there’s no need to upgrade as they are not providing anything more that I really need.
Problem is Office suite is so good that they need a technological jump to force users to upgrade. Mostly, something related to new hardware or hw capabilities.
For example, if there were an hardware which would be able to provide nearly perfect speech recognition, I’m sure many would upgrade, including myself.
In my opinion, they need either to find new space on other markets or provide a lightweight version which people with basic needs who’s using unlegal version could buy.
It’s the lack of competition, not that Microsoft built any great masterpiece.
Without competition, there is no impetus for improvement. So Office 2003 is basically Office XP with a new coat of paint.
It will be interesting to see if there is anything in Office 12 other than an eye candy Longhorn UI refresh and the fake open file format.
It’s the lack of competition, not that Microsoft built any great masterpiece.
If it was for lack of competition, we should be able to name tons of (worthy) features which we’d like to see in and others have.
The bare fact is instead that people prefer to get a pirated copy of Office instead of using a free copy of OO. That should be worth a better analysis than anger or blind anti-MS propaganda.
The first (less critical) reason is that Microsoft has never wanted want to tread on the toes of other companies who make software for the Windows platform.
Ah. So that explains why we have so many commercial web browsers, compilers, word processors, spreadsheets, and various other things out there.
Microsoft cared about them. 🙂
It was Microsoft’s polite way of saying “We didn’t want to step on their little toes… [because we had one team with a knife in the back and the other team with the howitzer in the front].”
Microsoft cannot make Office better because Microsoft is bereft of imagination. That is it, in a nutshell.
>That has been one nice feature native to OpenOffice/StarOffice – PDF generation.
The PDF generation function of OpenOffice is almost worthless. The whole point of PDF is that it’s the PORTABLE Document Format. The PDFs created by OO.org aren’t portable ’cause OO can’t embed fonts. That means everyone who wants to view the PDF must have all the fonts you use in your document installed or everything will look messed up.
What version of OOo did you use?
“Why hasn’t Microsoft added any of these (PDF) useful features to Office, yet? Or have they?”
In their inimitable style, they “invented” a new format, MDI (Microsoft Document Imaging), when they could’ve done what Apple did and implement PDF rendering in the OS — so anything you can print can be saved as a PDF. This doesn’t necessarily eliminate third party software (Adobe) for more advanced creation tools.
Google for PDFCreator. Its free and installs as a printer in all Windowsapplications. I use it for all my pdf-needs and it´s really cool.
OK.. you’ve just been promoted to run the ‘Microsoft Office Team’
How would you take the business forward, if at all? or would you talk yourself out of a job and say people don’t need the upgrade
Over to you guys – What now Boss?
Why give Microsoft help if they are not going to pay for it? It would be anti-capitalist.
You’re fired….next
😉
Why is this modded down, it sounds like a reasonable joke to me.
MS has often complained that the Open Source movement was just like Communism, this is just pointing out that blurring the lines like MS does means that the same can apply to them.
Dammit! As a member of Microsoft’s secret police (irrelevant online forum division), I was hoping you could be tricked into revealing some of your immensely-useful knowledge. I was hoping you might tell us how many layers of tinfoil it takes to keep the brain control rays out, but alas, it was not to be.
>OK.. you’ve just been promoted to run the ‘Microsoft
>Office Team’
>
>How would you take the business forward, if at all? or
>would you talk yourself out of a job and say people
>don’t need the upgrade
>
>Over to you guys – What now Boss?>
Simple… since your current market is saturated, I would focus on new markets to expand the customer base.
Easiest way to do that is to focus on non-ms operating systems. Make the current versions of office that run on Linux, Solaris, MacOS, etc.
Personally, I also think a stripped down version of office for a LOT less money might sell better than Works. Right now, open office has pretty much taken MSWorks of the radar for anyone who needs a real spreadsheet etc.
I thought there was a stripped down version that sometimes gets bundled from the OEMs. I think it just includes word, excel, and outlook. Unless you mean stripping out the features from these applications, which probably wouldn’t be too bad of an idea. But MS already did this for word and called it wordpad. Excel could be stripped by taking out goal seek and the scenerio thingy. Outlook, well there is outlook express but please leave a calender in it.
Yeah yeah…..so sad….M$ might have face reality. The real story is that people (mostly Windows users) aren’t being the blinder-wearing cattle or lemmings that they were early on with the whole Windows 95 craze. They are actually asking questions about security and related. This will be the same with Longhorn….the wall has been hit. It could be that we are truly getting to the point where computing is no longer a wonder to behold and serve with $$$….but just another utility type service like phone/cable/trash/water/gas/power that we accept as needed and pay for but not get really excited about…….UNLESS YOU USE OS X or OSS…..then you are perhaps in a different and more passionate category.
😉
Over 80% of the features are not used by anyone.
If you cut out the unneeded features and charge something reasonable — say $25 — then who would upgrade to the feature-overload version and pay $499.95 for Office Pro???
Precious few. And this big cash cow would suddenly be a tiny little calf slipping under the fence and into the wilderness, far away from the McRoSoft Hamburger Factory.
OpenOffice.org already does that; it’s a little short on a few features which MS Office has but not too many people actually use, and it costs nothing more than the bandwidth it takes to download it.
A lot of people don’t want to use OpenOffice.org because of the very fact it’s OSS though, others don’t want to because support for MS Office isn’t perfect, but it’s still there and it seems more than capable of meeting most people’s needs.
If OpenOffice.org came with some artwork and nice templates like MS Office, most people wouldn’t have a good enough reason to buy the more expensive MS product.
What is in Office now that wasn’t in Office 97?
Most people just need a basic wordprocessor.
Outlook is WAY overkill for email so the scheduling is it’s only feature you can’t get elsewhere easily. Outlook has been fully functional for years so why upgrade?.
People don’t want to learn new apps. Each version of Office is layed out differently and it confuses people.
I guess the only thing they can do is break older versions of Office on Longhorn and sell Office to people who buy new PC’s.
This is why Microsoft wanted to switch to a subscription model for its Office products; after you obtain the majority of the market and implement all of the necessary features, there’s fairly little reason to expect mass adoption of your product. Microsoft has thus far attempted to sell more copies by breaking file formats every release in hopes of capitalizing on a domino effect, and rearranging the UI. This is tantamount to attempting to make money by making its software less efficient for your business (have you ever seen the puzzled look someone has when they’re forced to figure out how to continue using Office after an upgrade?), and after a while people simply don’t want to pay a couple hundred dollars per seat to set productivity back. They could add more functionality to the suite, but unless it has a simple interface whatever they add will find its way into the “I don’t understand how to use it, so I don’t” pile that most of the features of Office find themselves in.
Microsoft’s solution was hinted at several times over the course of a few years: charge people a regular fee for the Microsoft Office service. Why, you’ll never have to upgrade again, because Microsoft will take care of mass deployment of its software across its heterogenous customer base. If you liked having your documents not work in older release before, you’ll love how Microsoft forces everyone on the planet to pay them a monthly fee to continue running their businesses as they break file formats every few weeks. Rejoice in the splendor of having a third party decide potentially costly “upgrades.” Pay the Microsoft tax forever, because Microsoft has conquered its market and only through gouging you can it maintain growth!
This is why Microsoft wanted to switch to a subscription model for its Office products.
This is true but you can also understand that. They cannot simply say: “ok, enough. No more Office versions…”. They need to sell. So if old model is not working anymore to make them sell, they need to switch.
On the other side you have a different situation (OSS one) where developers’ conflicting interests would make more convenient to have software which isn’t perfect to make money from “customization”. This is bas as well.
Of course, I’m referring to people who expects to make money from their products and that doesn’t apply to hobbysts.
As I said, it would be hard to sell more products until you have some HW improvements. That happens to all PC market and it’s the basis of market “crisis”. We’re successfully using 2001-era PCs (Athlons 800MHz) in our company. They do what we expect to, they’re fast in doing that, no reason to change.
Of course, that means that Intel or AMD didn’t sell a few more newer systems and that my investment lasted 4 years instead of 18months as it was in gold years.
I think it’s good that software companies face that and get accustomed to that. Of course, MS will try to push HW sales as much as it can, but the fact that they’re trying to change their model is a good sign as well.
Of course, if you won’t sell many 2003 (or Office 12) copies, you won’t be able to force a break in document compatibility so I don’t think they’re thinking about that now.
But of course, I expect that Microsoft will try to find ways to make money again. No doubt. After all, they’re a company.
They can in fact say “no more Office versions,” or much more realistically, “Office is mostly feature-complete and until such time as Microsoft sees new demand for functionality, it will be in maintenance mode.” IE hasn’t exactly been a hot field of development. Nor has the Windows calculator. None of the features Microsoft adds to its software require hardware improvements; other than eating RAM, Office applications are fairly modest. They spend the majority of their runtime waiting for input from the user.
What Microsoft doesn’t want to do is lose its cash cow (Office monopoly) despite not being able to add value to maintain sales (thus relying on propaganda to push a build that will be obsoleted soon). This is why it will try to move to the subscription model. The more expensive it makes Office without creating any value to its customers, the greater incentive it is creating for users to develop and switch to something else.
They can in fact say “no more Office versions,” or much more realistically, “Office is mostly feature-complete and until such time as Microsoft sees new demand for functionality, it will be in maintenance mode.”
I don’t think it’s as easy as you picture it. While technology improvements lack, neither Ferrari nor GM stated that they would stop producing new models and that they would just produce old ones with a few maintenance improvements.
Of course, MS wouldn’t like to lose their milky cow but once your product doesn’t sell, you’d lost that cow anyway. And, moreover, if MS was to state that major updates to Office are over, they would just get a hit on image field. They would “admit” not to be able to produce new technology and no sane people would do that because that would give impression that you can’t do that while “maybe others could do” (even if that wouldn’t be true, if my analisys is right).
If your Office 2003 only got 15% of market (as article stated), that would mean that you cannot directly control that market anymore because any “special feature” you could introduce with newer versions wouldn’t be accepted by most users.
That would mean they could only introduce incompatibilities by modifying something inside Windows, which would spark anti-trust procedures.
So they’re at a standstill. It will be interesting to see how they will get out of this. Many companies could learn how to escape such problems if MS founds a way.
It is as easy as I stated it. What it isn’t, is a continued source of revenue for Microsoft. They can, like they have done with many of their products, simply maintain Office’s codebase to fix bugs and improve performance of corner cases. It’s as easy as scaling your Office team to reflect the market. It’s just not going to maintain the revenues that Microsoft has historically counted on.
What they will do is attempt to leverage their monopoly to continue these revenues through the subscription model. Some people will adopt it, their business documents will only be accessible through Office Subscriber, so those that have to interoperate with their businesses will have to purchase Office Subscriber, and like with previous incompatability pushes Microsoft will get a toe hold into revenues that it wouldn’t otherwise obtain at all.
> And, moreover, if MS was to state that major updates to Office are over, they would just get a hit on image
> field. They would “admit” not to be able to produce new technology and no sane people would do that because
> that would give impression that you can’t do that while “maybe others could do” (even if that wouldn’t be
> true, if my analisys is right).
This is pure nonsense. Microsoft abandoned Internet Explorer almost completely for years (rather than even properly maintain it). Even after it atrophied and acted as a conduit for a huge amount of the malware people toss computers out over, Firefox has only dented Microsoft’s market share. Microsoft Windows ships with lots of software that hasn’t seen any substantive changes since the ’90s.
Wasting large swaths of money on developing software that isn’t adopted (because it adds no value) doesn’t work. They realize that, and that’s the point of the subscription model: guaranteed revenue.
> That would mean they could only introduce incompatibilities by modifying something inside
> Windows, which would spark anti-trust procedures.
No, it means sticking them in Office and making your users contend with the inconvenience of not updating to your latest software. They can upgrade or they can suffer efficiency losses here and there. Microsoft knows that it holds all of the chips.
If they didn’t cost nearly as much as the general office PC it’s being put on.
I can get a PC from Dell or Gateway for office use from secretaries to lawyers to accounts, for $400-$500.
Then I add Office for $312.95 (newegg.com) and my $500 PC is now over $800?
That’s insane!
I think we’ve reached a stage where people can’t take the new features anymore. Not that they are stupid or anything but they are just not interested. Also, they consider that all this learning won’t be worth the investment. It won’t save time, won’t make their lives easier, because in their experience, new features don’t work and cause more problems than they are trying to solve. Why would they buy new features ?
Also, there are plenty of useful features in Word but most people have no idea they are there : I have never workded anywhere where people knew that word could track changes, manage comments, let alone use document templates.
Instead, people do it all manually, even the merging of documents.
The problem is that most software pacakges have already way more features than what normal and even smart people want to know about.
The problem is that most software pacakges have already way more features than what normal and even smart people want to know about.
Agreed. Yes, an Office Team system could make you do some tasks in seconds instead of minutes, but sending your .doc to your co-worker via LAN or E-Mail takes seconds as well and, after you do that, your job is “done”.
It’s interesting that, until now, MS has been able to push sales without leveraging on products’ prices so much. Most of their products have same price rate they had years ago and this has been true even when you have competing products which are FREE (which is best price ;-).
That means that MS wasn’t hurt very much by competition during these years. If they won’t find more space, they will be forced to drop prices to keep sales rate.
The most interesting thing is they wouldn’t do that because of competition (hence, to keep their share) but because market is saturated.
I think that’s why Intel wanted to get Apple on board. Only a technology change can keep HW sales rate up and Apple is the only company who can force users to buy new hardware even if they don’t need that. Interesting part is: how is Intel paying to Apple to do that per machine? 😉
Until someone invents something revolutionary, people will consolidate expenses they did in previous years and software won’t be able to do anything substantially “new” until HW evolves.
>Simple… since your current market is saturated, I >would focus on new markets to expand the customer base.
>Easiest way to do that is to focus on non-ms operating >systems. Make the current versions of office that run on >Linux, Solaris, MacOS, etc.
Ah, but those markets are tiny compared to Windows, it’s simply not worth the time and effort. Office is a huge product, converting it to these okatforms would cost a fortune and the return would simply not reflect the investment. In any case Office already runs on MacOS and even here there are sometimes rumours the MS will stop support because of the small size of the market.
Solaris, what’s that?
Linux, trouble with Linux, everyone expects stuff to be free so I think it would be very difficult to sell office to the linux crowd even if they wanted it (which they don’t).
MS has got a problem with Office and it is not careful it could be it’s undoing.
The 80% argument that most people only use 20$ of the product is not entirely true. What apparently happen is that a particular individual may only use 20$ of a product but each individual uses a different 20$ so it isn’t possible to do a stipped down version for everyone.
I was involved in a software rollout a few years back. It took four new hires two months to deal both hardware and software upgrades on 240 machines, troubleshooting when something did go wrong, and assisting people who probably shouldn’t have “graduated” from retraining. I would hate to think about how much money was burned for that transition, and I only saw part of the process.
By the time you consider the cost of the software and hardware upgrades, the cost of staff to handle the upgrade, and the loss in productivity from staff who need to use these systems, there is very little incentive to rollout new software only to have pressure to initiate a similar process 18 months down the road.
Excellent point, TBPrince. MS can push the market when it comes to Windows but with Office its another story. Where I work we have approximately 20 PCs. We’re migrating everyone to Windows XP but the majority are staying with Office 97. Go figure. And yes, I’m researching migrating to OpenOffice.org v2 to replace Word/Excel/Powerpoint but that’s a few months away.
Damien
Upgrading Office is really becoming useless. Office 2000 really did do everything I ever need my Office Suite to do. Office XP, 2003 are worthless upgrades for their cost. OpenOffice is probably where Office 95 was. Nice and solid to use, but if you already have Office 2000, you won’t think of moving to it. Eventually OpenOffice will get better than Office 2000 (probably around 3.0) and then I’ll migrate to OpenOffice. Until then, I’ll stick to Office 2000.
Anyways, Microsoft wont ever be able to make the money they made off of Office like they did in the 90’s. Like the typewriter, office suite are standard and everywhere nowadays. Microsoft has to realize that those days of ripping of customers are long gone. Instead, Microsoft should now just focus on getting their Office Suite on new PC’s and have some kind of $10/year/family Office upgrade/support subscription plan. That way, they can focus on just supporting one version of office and people will upgrade to the latest and greatest lock-in features all the time. Every 12 months, Microsoft can introduce a whole bunch of neat new features. If people choose not to pay the $10 yearly fee, their office copy should work perfectly well, but be completely unsupported and unpatchable. People will be able to buy themselves back into the support plan with a $50 initialization fee.
I always found it interesting that Microsoft seems to want NOTHING to do with supporting their products.
I would think that once everyone already has your product then support services would be the way to get continuing cash flow as result of those sales.
Thats the way everyone else does it.
Its very curious Microsoft has such shitty software support and is really only geared towards large corporate accounts and don’t offer much for home users, small/med businesses.
Pawning all their software support “costs” onto people like Dell, HP etc. by telling people to call them might just come back and bite them in the ass by not having the ability to get this revenue stream.
release a Linux version…- Oh no, I forgot – the other branch wouldnt let you 😉
Some people would actually buy it, in fact you can already run MS Office in Linux using CrossOverOffice, it just doesn’t work perfectly under emulation yet.
MS probably wouldn’t port it because that would mean having to use one of the Linux tookits. I just can’t picture MS Office with a Motif or GTK interface, and Qt will probably be neglected again because for proprietary software it’s not free as in $$. Now MS Office with wxWidgets might be interesting, although if they decide to write a future version with a dotNet language that might mean it’ll run with Mono :-p .
Qt will probably be neglected again because for proprietary software it’s not free as in $$.
If they want to use Qt, I’m sure MS can afford it.
i think alot of people are going to go openoffice.org. its going to happen. when open office is free, theres no way anyone is going to pay what amounts to a whole paycheck for microsofts office. Businesses are going to start using open office. except where microsofts thing is required.
theres no way anyone is going to pay what amounts to a whole paycheck for microsofts office
Ouch! I feel pretty sorry for you if the price of Microsoft Office is equal to one of your paychecks. I would guess if you work in a profession where $400 – $500 is one of your paychecks you probably don’t need the features of Microsoft Office to do your work, Microsoft Works or maybe even Word Pad would suffice.
All MS has to do is make something in XP sp3 break older versions of office — then be slow to fix the problem — then again that may just lead people to some better solutions.
I really don’t want to sound like trolling, but I’m quite happy with TeX/LaTex – works fantastic for me, no need for any kind of office software here…
TeX is excellent for writing papers, but it’s not much of a spreadsheet, a platform for constructing simple database applications, a means of taking notes, a groupware tool, or anything of that sort. Put simply, it’s only a replacement for Office if all you happen to do is typeset documents.
Hehe.. Funny you should mention tex/latex, Im doing my math homework in LyX right now in another window. Nothing impresses math professors more than beautiful typeset math formulas…and its sooo easy to do with tex/latex/lyx.
http://www.lyx.org/
GNU TeXmacs is also interesting for such work, and can interface with CAS (as can Lyx) like Maxima, Axiom, and Yacas.
Wrong. OpenOffice can lose even though it is free. The factor that decides which will win is how much can MS Office do that OpenOffice can’t and how much is that worth? If Microsoft is able to justify it’s software, people will stick with Office. Unfortunately for Microsoft, a $300 cost difference does not justify it. But if Microsoft drops it to the $10 – $50 range, Office will be worth a look.
I’de be very supprised if ms ever offered office for linux…main reason…. linux is a threat and ms knows this… why would they make it easier for people or businesses to migrate to linux?…. this would be an absoulte last resort for ms if they saw there market falling apart.
It still prints page number as Page 1 of 1, Page 2 of 2, Page 3 of 3 for a 3 page document. That had to be fixed in SP1 for Office 2000 – has it been fixed in a SP for 2003?
I guess it show its from the same code base when the same bugs show up.
I’m fine with Office 2000 -Pro.
It does everything I need to do. Everything my users do. And has no activation. Remove activation and I’ll upgrade.
I am getting a little sick of unintelligent posts like ‘Office is not innovating’ and the like.
Let me enlighten those that missed the major transition that Office 2003 kicked off. Office 2003 is labelled the “Office System”, not the “Office Suite” as with previous versions. It is a platform for building business applications.
Reasoning that many users spent much of their day inside an Office application, Microsoft focused on adding extensibility such that Office could integrate data and functionality that users would otherwise task-switch to another application for.
Another important innovation is the improved reusability of Office documents, which are now primarily stored in XML with a published XSD schema. Studies show that most corporate data is stored in Word format. Microsoft wants to make it dramatically easier to interoperate with that data. Also, documents with a totally custom schema can be edited using Word or Excel much in the manner of a visual designer.
Need I mention that two new major applications were added to the suite, OneNote and InfoPath.
The point is, rather than developing an application from scratch, consider extending the Office platform. And think before you type.
I am getting a little sick of unintelligent posts like ‘Office is not innovating’ and the like.
Let me enlighten those that missed the major transition that Office 2003 kicked off. Office 2003 is labelled the “Office System”, not the “Office Suite” as with previous versions. It is a platform for building business applications.
Reasoning that many users spent much of their day inside an Office application, Microsoft focused on adding extensibility such that Office could integrate data and functionality that users would otherwise task-switch to another application for.
Another important innovation is the improved reusability of Office documents, which are now primarily stored in XML with a published XSD schema. Studies show that most corporate data is stored in Word format. Microsoft wants to make it dramatically easier to interoperate with that data. Also, documents with a totally custom schema can be edited using Word or Excel much in the manner of a visual designer.
Need I mention that two new major applications were added to the suite, OneNote and InfoPath.
The point is, rather than developing an application from scratch, consider extending the Office platform. And think before you type.
If thats not some paid shill for MS astroturfing…no one is.
I +would+ like to be paid, I’ll admit.
ISnt this just a tad biased view? Office has worked properly for all my “office” needs with minimal hitches. PDF generation has never been an issue either, worked flawlessly.
[Treza]
Apart from obvious features lacking, like the PDF export, I still have major troubles with MS Office. Microsoft pretend to sell MS Office System in order to target a tighter integration with third parties apps but the integration between basic MS Office components is still bad.
For example, even with Office 2003 : Start PowerPoint. Draw a square. Add two texts inside the square, rotate 90° one of them. Create a group with these 3 elements. Copy/ Paste this square to Word. Try reducing the size of the picture in word. Try the various Paste As… options and edit it inside Word. ( Most people don’t have Visio ). Watch the results.
And, btw, why does Word suggests me twice a day to install netherlands or german dictionnaries when I type mixed english / french text ? Why isn’t there any way to have proper styling for characters and arrays ? Why does text output is so ugly comparing with Framemaker and TeX ? Why is it impossible to create and edit big documents with Word ? Why does it have a fuzzy understanding of grid alignment of objects ? Why are we still stuck with spreadsheets softwares ( the concept of mixing data and operations in a [naval battle game numbered] matrix made sense in 80×25 text screens of early computers, nowadays it seems to me as modern as a chalk and a slate ) ? Why when I draw a equation with Word that thing cannot be used to make calculations with Excel ?
About pricing, I think that OO is appropriately priced, at 0$. MS Office isn’t worth more as it is both better an d worse on differents parts.
Well, I needed to exprimate my anger. I’ll calm down now…
I don’t think that the history is over, I don’t think that MS Word is the acme of word processing, it is actually so bad that it will stimulate dramatic innovations in the range of deconstruction of monolithic apps, because, there isn’t any real fundamental difference between Visio and Powerpoint or between Word and Pagemaker.
Several comments have been made about the UI being different, commands in different locations, and other “toy” features; I will not coment further on those issues. Additional comments about the cost of Microsoft Office opposed to Shareware or Freeware products (Open Office being only one example); I will skip those issues, also.
For me, (I write for a living) the only real issues are dependability, power, and transportability to other platforms. Misrosoft Office fails those criteria.
I use Windows 2000 Professional with Office 2000 Premium. The combination is powerful and dependable for letter writing needs, but not for serious documentation. I have seen nothing in later versions of Office to indicate any improvements in handling large, complex documents.
I have some minor uses for Excel and PowerPoint; I also use Access for a few databases I have designed. None of this stuff is terribly complex, and none of necessitates any sort of upgrade.
Why do I use them? They were purchased in late 1999, early 2000 through my university (academic versions) and they did the job. They still do those jobs. The software was relatively inexpensive (academic price) and dependable.
I have no reason to purchase any sort of newer version or upgrade, OS or Office Suite, until these two are no longer supported in any way. Micorsoft has to build a much better mousetrap.
Mike
I have 3 licenced versions of MsOffice: Office 95, 97 and 2000; the version I ended up – and still am – using is Office 95.
It’s the best for what I need, and the most stable and trouble-free.
Guess I’m not the only one finding himself in that position …